Mark Ayers

“You are, unfortunately, embedded in your thinking” is more unsettling than it first appears.

Optimistic Nihilism embraces the meaninglessness of existence as liberating rather than depressing.

Most of mental life happens unobserved.

When facing circumstances that feel unbearable, three options exist: departure, transformation, or acceptance.

The Paradox of Tolerance presents a tension in liberal societies: unlimited tolerance destroys tolerance itself.

Summary of Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean.

The old man sat by the river.

Trump’s presidency is a stress test.

by Mark Ayers, 2025 Hearken now to Thought’s great saga, How Mind’s wheel forever turns, Grinding memory to powder, Each turn erasing what was learned.

Lead or conform.

Goals pinned to an identity—writer, athlete, founder—tend to collapse under pressure, because the label carries no instructions.

Age 1 Day 1 Month 1 Year 10 0.027% 0.83% 10.0% 20 0.014% 0.42% 5.0% 30 0.0091% 0.28% 3.33% 40 0.0068% 0.21% 2.5% 50 0.0055% 0.17% 2.0% 60 0.0046% 0.14% 1.67% 70 0.0039% 0.12% 1.43% 80 0.0034% 0.10% 1.25% Age 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 10 1.0x 2.0x 3.0x 4.0x…

Some happiness depends on not knowing, and once you know, you can’t get back.

“Your religion is built on a vast collection of useful lies; but, useful to whom?”

We are between orders.

Lessing took Sufi teaching and translated it into the one Western genre that could smuggle mysticism past scientific materialism: science fiction.

A man in motion never learns who he is when the motion stops.

Montaigne invented the essay, or at least named it.

Laziness in its useful sense is a refined economy of effort.

The model centered on autonomy balanced by alignment.

“We live in the age of insincerity” functions as observation, diagnosis, and lament—and that most people would nod along without examining what they’re agreeing to is itself a small proof of the claim.

“We don’t become adults until we need to, and when we need to, we do, very quickly” carries a deceptively simple observation that cuts against one of our most cherished cultural narratives—that growing up is gradual, a developmental accumulation of wisdom…

“All of our solutions move the problem.

There is a particular kind of catastrophe that leaves no scar, no crater, no memorial—the catastrophe that erases the evidence of its own occurrence.

Elite engineers don’t get there through talent alone—they engineer specific conditions for growth.

Your identity is a story you’re constantly writing.

You face three choices about existence.

Note added 2026-09-06: the epistemic line now reads COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·FARE—fare, the imperative of the deponent fari, “to speak”, in place of enuntia, “declare”—and PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE is no longer one of my mottos.

Before the 2020s, you needed television to follow the broader culture.

Up Next The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, 2003 The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, 2023 Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue (2026) Added Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn · edited by Robert Lynn Asprin · 1980 Shadows of Sanctuary · edited by Robert Lynn Asp…

by Mark Ayers, 2018 The clouds forge phantom landscapes As mind’s eye strives to match them To the hidden earth below— Each peak and valley traced In vaporous invention Then: Light fractures cloud-walls And the mind’s map falters Between snow-fields and c…

by Mark Ayers, 2017 Bare feet on snow— White dust yields to warmth.

Mumpsimus: a person who obstinately adheres to old ways, customs, or ideas despite clear evidence they’re wrong or outdated.

by Mark Ayers, 1984 More poetry is written Than ever will be read.

by Mark Ayers, 1984 More poetry is written Than ever will be read.

The Creator shaped an elegant system—its elements interlocked, its complexity grown from within rather than layered on top.

“What you create is a function of the library in your head”—the phrase sounds almost too obvious to be worth saying.

When every voice is Cassandra, no one hears the warning.

There’s a shift happening that most of us are describing wrong.

This story will end.

For roughly 200,000 years, Homo sapiens has been generating, sharing, and building upon knowledge without any concept of intellectual property.

“All stories are true.

“Know your nature, and lean against it” carries a quiet paradox: it asks you to understand yourself deeply and then resist what you find.

I learned the year not by calendars but by the willow.

For ages $n \geq n_{\min}$ (cultural), acceptable partner ages fall in $\left[\max!

For most of my life, the crowd was older than I was.

by Mark Ayers, 1986 Poetry that’s written To entertain oneself Has a value of its own Just like a little elf Who putters about And picks his toes And doesn’t have a care Who runs around Without clothes In the morning air.

by Mark Ayers, 2024 We seek labels to wear—to place upon our brow—to say to ourselves and to others, “Yes.

by Mark Ayers, 2019 Chasing the sun westward At thirty-five thousand feet, and On the remotest mountain valley Are the fingerprints of our fellow man The hard edges of our ordered way Between cloud and snow Define and declare who we are, and What we are a…

“A person who sells what they never owned and never loses what they repeatedly give away has mastered a form of leverage that most people never perceive as possible.”